False.

The final performance by the young girls was also discussed. You can find it if you want to watch something disgusting, but it was very sexual and OBVIOUSLY inappropriate for children.

That it's common to see children perform such sexual routines at dance competitions doesn't mean it's appropriate.

The idea that this was Only The Poster was a lie created by a media that thinks child exploitation is OK. Look at the media response to the film "Sound of Freedom", where it's "QAnon adjacent" to oppose child sex trafficking.

"Sexual" is relative so people will just be talking past each other in regards to that. There's no real discussion to be had there.

>The idea that this was Only The Poster was a lie created by a media that thinks child exploitation is OK

FWIW, I only heard about the poster and nothing about the full release. I'm sure some people still argued in the same way people argue about anything for months/years on end, but there was definitely a lot more controversy about the poster. Be it because it was the first look/awareness of the film, or because the film was simply nothing to write about can be left to people who actually watched the movie. I have no interest to.

These guys did:

As for Netflix, how can the company possibly reconcile a “coming-of-age” film, and one that centers entirely on 11-year-old girls, with a TV-MA rating? This is not a random decision – it has become corporate practice.

We have frequently called on Netflix to stop hosting content that sexualizes children, such as Baby, Big Mouth, Sex Education, or that glamorizes rape and sexual assault such as 365 Days.

And Netflix habitually markets adult content to young audiences. Parents Television Council research of Netflix programming designated as “Teen” reveals that nearly half was rated either TV-MA (104 titles, or 40.8%) or R (23 titles, or 9.0%); and every single program that carried a TV-14 moniker included harsh profanities.

While we may not always see eye-to-eye with film critics, the criticism of the critics is telling. Cuties is not the first time Netflix has blatantly promoted programming that sexualizes children, but we’re calling on them for this to be the last.

> Such as the movie "Hostel". I never understood why that is OK, why the music industry has pushed gangsta rap etc. for decades, but then something like Cuties out of France which actually critiques the hypersexualization of teenage girls that is taking place, causes an uproar, while the industries doing the hypersexualization are now an accepted part of our liberal "freedom of speech".

AFAIK, everyone involved in the production of "Hostel" was a legal adult.

The girls who were the main characters in "Cuties" were not legal adults, nor anywhere close. I don't even think they were teenagers. From the clip I saw, it wasn't a _critique_ of hypersexualization so much as LITERAL HYPERSEXUALIZATION. There may have been an ironic plot around it saying "this is bad mmm'kay" but that doesn't excuse using children to engage in sexualized behavior.

There's an important conversation to be had about US culture and violence versus sex and language (South Park parodied this well), but "Cuties" is a horrible example because it used actual children to engage in actual sexual objectification.

Yet no one gave a shit. This is the new Satanic panic, a scapegoat to avoid focusing ourselves on important shit.

Paranoia sells, and it's the main fuel of the US style Capitalism, getting a full panic state almost monthly in order to be a mindless consumer.

OFC satanic panic was the same crap, in order to keep the children and teens away to non-consumit (read: TV and mainstream toys, music and movies) so the industry didn't collapse in a few years. And, yet, thanks to internet, years later, they did.

Guess what? between the show sections, (and shows themselves) they are trying to sell home alarms with lots of ads in the morning to the viewers. Bingo.